This page is
devoted to a brief introduction
to early mills
with emphasis on the Fayette,
Iowa area. Good mills were absolutely
necessary to the development of early farms and villages. Rough cut lumber, grist/flour, wool were all needed in quantity.
Often as the mill in area developed, so did the community. Robert
Alexander built the first mill at Westfield/Fayette in 1850, thus the village of
Westfield was started and grew. Second generation mills would be built at
Westfield. Because of the mill Alexander and his brother-in-law stayed in
the Fayette area. By 1855, they had acquired enough money from land
speculation and milling that they could support their families idea of building
a college on the knoll in Fayette. Westfield was developing, while Fayette was
little more than a very few log cabins and rough cut buildings, along with a
couple of merchants and a small grist mill. In two years, a large
multi-story, elaborate (for the frontier times) College was erected from big
blocks of cut limestone by frontier masons.
Upper Iowa University was the result, and thus led to the development and existence
of the Village of Fayette as we know it in history, and even today. No Westfield Mill, no
Alexander/Robertson in the valley, no UIU, no Fayette. A
similar story could be told of the connection between the mills and all of the
villages on the Volga River, or any river in the area.

The Albany, Fayette
County, Iowa, Mill shown in a very rare 1869 pictograph on the fringe of one of the
earliest functional Fayette County maps known, in the possession of the Fayette County
Historical Society in West Union. The first mill at Albany was a
basic saw mill built on this site in 1854 by Albert Albertson who also built a
large store at the same time in Albany. Albertson sold the mill and site
to Richard Earl in the fall of 1855. Earl ran the first generation mill
with improvements until 1865, when he built the large second generation flouring
mill seen above. The mill was constructed of limestone blocks quarried
locally and measured 30x35 feet and was three stories high. The mill dam
was 160 feet wide, ten feet tall, and 27 feet thick at its base, constructed of
heavy timbers filled with stone. The Albany Mill was considered on
of the best mills in the area from 1865 to about 1880. Farmers would often
travel to Albany from the western edge of Fayette County. Near the Mill,
back to the left of this pic, a major chair, furniture factory was built
about the same time. Albany/Lima were booming pioneer villages from 1865
to about 1890. The railroad would come to the immediate area in the mid
1870's. Sad to say, today the villages are gone without a trace. Few
people are still alive with memory or living history of the towns.

The Albany Mill was an example of a second
generation more elaborate mill built after the first more basic mills of the
early 1850's, which supplied rough cut lumber and grist in sufficient quantity to
support the rapid flow of farmers and villagers into the area. By the late
1850's and into the 1860's a number of larger more elaborate mills would be
built. Most 3-5 levels high, often of native limestone blocks quarried
locally my masons or the mill wrights themselves. Usually these larger
mills employed 10-30 local workman and were the "corner stone
industry" in the village. With the coming of the railroads and rapid
mass transport into the highly populated areas of the country, the local
village/county mills rapidly diminished in numbers, with most becoming extinct
by the late 1800's.

DAILY PIONEER LIFE
Household chores were very tedious for
pioneer families. The most of the waking hours were spend in fairly
intensive hard labor for preparation of basic needs. No sheep, no wool, no
yarn, no clothing. No flax or hemp, no fibers, no rope/clothing. No
crops, no seed, no crops, no food. Shelter/clothing/food were the absolute
immediate, pressing needs. Everyone, including children were intensely
involved. One of the problems was transforming the grain into the meal or
flour.

MORTAR AND PESTLE, AND HAND MILLS
In many early settlements the pioneers produced the corn meal or a coarse grist
of wheat or other grains by means of a mortar of stone or heavy wooden logs. The grain was put in
and pounded for hours with a pestle of stone or wood, and when
sufficiently beaten the finer particles were separated from the coarser by a
common sieve, or by swirling it in a bowl much like panning for gold, and
removing the various levels as best they could. The hand methods
were marginally functional and not very efficient, taking long
hours. The finer grind could be used for making flat or heavy
breads, and the coarser for hominy. Often an oak stump/log was just cupped out
by burning and seeds pounded with a big piece of blunt wood to crush the seeds to a meal.
The mortar/pestle process was slow and wearisome, and other
methods were needed. Feed for animals was often made
by crushing corn cobs with some of the corn left on.

When possible a kind of hand mill called a quern,
rapidly supplanted the old mortar. It was constructed by putting the flat sides
of two relatively large stones together, the lower one shaped until it had a raised rim
into which the top stone to rested. Troughs were chiseled into the
face of the bottom stone to channel meal to
an opening on the side. The bottom stoned was placed on a firm/solid
surface. The upper stone lay inside the top stone, and had a different
pattern of channels cut into it. A hole was made to one
side of the upper stone, into which was forced a round pin, used as a handle, to
put the mill in motion by one hand, while the other was used to feed it through
a hole in the center, a few grains of corn/wheat/oats/barley/rye/or often
whatever seeds were available for food. The upper stone was not easy to
turn, but had to be heavy for the grain could not be crushed. A quern would produce
a very course crushed meal, not flour. The family was certain of fresh meal
as one could not grind enough to last for many days. Simple as the mills
of this kind were, they remained very scarce at first and used only by a
few fortunate settlers.
The majority clung to the old mortar and pestle, the noise of which sometimes
could be heard long after the usual hour of retiring, usually women busy in the preparation of
the meal and hominy for the morning's breakfast. The constant employment of
about one member of each family was required to keep the family provided with
flat bread.

Another method of providing meal in the early
days was by the use of a grater. A plate of tin was pierced with many holes, so
that one side was very rough. This tin plate was usually bent oval shape and
attached to a board. The ear of corn was rubbed very hard on the grater and the
meal was forced through the holes and collected in a vessel or a box. These early
grater mills used by the pioneers were sometimes termed as
"Armstrong-Mills."

ANIMAL POWERED MILLS
Later the horse/ox power mills were used, and they soon gave way to the
water mills. Horse/ox mills where usually tread mills where a single or team
of animals would walk on a huge wooden treadle wheel which turned, through
wooden gears big mill stones. These were low tech mills, and often the
stones would be local slabs of pie shaped sandstone or limestone held
together by forged iron rings, or sometimes big one piece stones. These stones were soft and did not last
very long, but could be rebuilt on the site, as local stone resources were
unlimited in most places in Fayette County. For water mills, dams were constructed across creeks and rivers
at convenient points. The water going over the dam was used to turn a large,
wooden water wheel which furnished the power to operate the stone-burrs of the
mill which ground the corn/grain/seeds, or ran a reciprocating saw blade.

THE LAND IMMEDIATELY WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI IS
TAKEN BY "TREATY" AND OPENS TO "INVADING" WHITES
Almost immediately when the Neutral Grounds in
Fayette County opened up to the whites in 1849-1854, mills were rapidly established to serve their
needs. The same was true on the Upper Iowa River at Freeport in 1853, and in
Shelby County, Missouri in 1838. These being my primary areas of
interest as a couple of relative surnames were pioneer mill wrights at these
dates.

Grist mills to grind grain to flour and for
animal feed, fulling mills to process wool for clothing, and sawmills to furnish
lumber for building homes, churches and stores. The mills were located every few
miles along the Volga to harness water power to run the mill machinery. Because of
abundant water power, pioneer settlement naturally clustered along the Volga and
the villages of Westfield, Fayette, Albany, Lima, Wadena, and Volga City
developed.

The first mills used undershot or overshot water
wheels, with the water channeled under or over a big water wheel, the flow of the
water causing the wheel to turn. This rotary motion was transferred through a
system of wooden gears, and leather belts over wooden pulleys to operate the mill
machinery/ Later water
powered turbines were used instead of mill wheels. The big water wheels required
big mill ponds. The first mills built on the Volga were much smaller than
the ones that would rapidly replace them in the 1860's. Even in the
smaller mills, however, the overshot wheels were large, being generally from 15
to 25 feet tall and the large wheel was needed for a small amount of water
weight/force to turn the gears/pulleys which turned a heavy set of grist stones
or moved a saw blade up and down. That is the reason for large wheels, to
increase the mechanical advantage. A small force turned through a large
distance to turn a large force/weight through a small distance.

The
pioneer mill wrights knew their physics. There was a logical reason for
everything they did. Milling was learned from their relatives/clan by
apprentice style. In cold climates the mills were kept running if at all
possible. Many times the frozen wheel would need the ice chopped off
before it had enough force to turn. Milling was physically tough work for
long hours. Mills were built several stories high when time and resources
allowed, as the grain was fed from the top and gravity used to move it down a
serious of steps leading the final produce. Second generation mills were big
structures. They had to be, as they housed large "machinery" and
commodities. Thus all the grain had to be carried by hand to the top
floors, or a series of ropes and pulleys utilized so oxen could be used to hoist
it up to the top level.

The grist/saw mill in Lincoln's New Salem
Pioneer Village near St. Petersburg, Illinois is a good example of a
first generation mill. Relatively small, build out of hand hewn
and rough cut timbers and lumber, with a relatively small mill dam

The dams were generally made by digging
timbers down into the bottom or by trying to attach base timbers to
limestone bed rock with hand forged pins driven into holes in the stone,
formed by metal stone drills hit with big hammers. The problem
with the first dams was withstanding the huge water pressure created at
their bases by 6-15 feet of water, and then of course the winter ice
when it went out in the spring. If stone/rock was available it was
almost always incorporated into the dams. Second generation dams
might be entirely rock.

The
first generation mills often had just one floor above the wheel and
gears which turned two relatively small mill stones. Milling of
grain might be done in one room, with a small storeroom off to one
side. The same wheel and wooden gears would be used to move a
stiff, thick saw blade back and forth to rough cut logs for timbers and
boards.

In the model of the New Salem Village
Mill, the mill stones can be seen on the left with the grain hopper
sitting above them. The saw blade and tract is on the right.
Almost every piece of the mill was wood.

Second generation mills were much larger,
multilevel structures, often built of native limestone blocks 5-6 feet
thick at the base. Big limestone blocks might also be used in the
more elaborate dams.

This mill is very similar to the first
mill built in the Westfield/Fayette Valley by Robert Alexander in
1850. Another page will be devoted to Alexander and his mill.

MILL STONES WERE AN IMPORTANT COMMODITY ON THE
FRONTIER

Millstones were often imported from France and
brought overland by oxen during the 1800's. One piece millstones were not
too common before railroad transportation to the Midwest in the 1870's. France produced some of the
worlds finest millstones from granite in their mountain ranges. They were
made of sections held together by an iron band, with grooves cut in the faces of
the stones to channel grain/grist/floor toward an opening to the outside. Periodically new grooves
had to be cut by hand with metal chisels in the faces of the stones.
Big mill stones often weighed 1500lb each. Even small stones weighted
hundreds of pounds.

When granite millstones were not available the locals
often had to resort to using much softer sandstone or limestone.

When a mill was running the water level in the
mill pond next to the "mill house" would drop and would eventually
have to be allowed to recover to
its original height.

The second generation, bigger and more elaborate
mills on the Volga often were capable of producing about 50 barrels of flours a
day, so one must assume the first generation, smaller mills would grind 10-20
barrels a day, and would not be producing flour but a course meal or
grist. The second generation mills had time proven engineering and kept the flour grinding evenly through the
machinery on all floors by a belting system from a line shaft powered by either
bigger and better wheels or by
vertical turbines located in the water of the mill races in the lower levels or
basements. Turbines did not require the big deep mill ponds. Good turbine
and wheels could develop between 50 and 75 horsepower. The simple yet complex
system of wooden gears and pulleys ran the machinery which converted the wheat/grain into
flour, or sawed logs, or ran carding and other machinery.

Roller mills would come into the county in the
later decades of the 1800's. These mills utilized rollers instead of
millstones. Instead of grinding they would "brake" the grain
kernel. Starting in the
first brake, the grain was rolled a little finer in each subsequent operation
though a series of several brakes. The flour was constantly sifted though cloth,
generally pure
silk which was made on hand looms in Switzerland. This sifting is called
bolting. The flour might go though as many as 50-70 silks before being bagged from the
finishing sifter.

Rough cut timbers and boards were needed for the
rapid building of new structures on pioneer farms and in the villages. It
one does a close inspection of the remaining barns, houses, buildings out of the
1800's and early 1900's the timbers and boards will look like these freshly cut
during the 2000 Lincoln County Missouri Old Thrasher's Days by using an 1870's
steam engine for power and a big rotary saw blade, just like it was done until
into the early 1900's. The first generation water powered saw mills used a
straight flat saw blade and often the cut was much rougher than that show
below. Oak and walnut where the favorites, but any wood available would be
used in some fashion.

During pioneer times paint was not used.
The boards often took on a graying, weathered appearance. Sometimes lime,
made locally by "burning" limestone, then mixing the lime powder with
water, clay, and sometimes other local minerals, to produce "white
wash" has wiped on the boards with rags or leather tied to a stick.
And later brushes. If plant oils like linseed oil was available in
quantity it was often wiped on the wood. Oil used seasonally would repel
moisture and help preserve the wood.

THE FIRST MILL WRIGHTS, MILL STONES, TAKING
GRAIN TO THE MILL
The absence of good mill stones often limited the number of mills in the
earliest days of the settlement of an area. Mill stones were some of the
earliest "imported" items in which men invested in during pioneer
times. Many were imported from Europe in the 1700's, and could be used as
blast in ships. With the movement of the pioneers in the early 1800's toward the
west, mill stones and millers became a very serious commodity and were in great
demand. Many people knew how to farm, cooper, smith, but to select the
right spot to build a functional mill, and then to have the knowledge and
experience to use local wood and stone to construct these very complex
structures took true millers who had learned their trade young and had made the
move west. These men build all cogs, gears, wheels for handmade leather belts
from wood, stone, and a little forged metal, right on the mill site. Many
of the early mills had what is a big "overshot" wheel where the water
runs over the top of a big wheel. The type of mill wheel most of us
visualize. These overshot mill wheels required very deep, large mill
ponds.

Mill wrights had not only to be capable of building complex mills,
but had to understand the hydrology factors of building large log/earth/rock
dams across streams. Mills and mill dams were very large, complex
structures generally build by 1-6 men using hand tools and ox teams. Often
one man with a young son or two, using only hand axles and blades, with one oxen
would build the first mill on a small stream. Or a couple of families in
partnership. They probably would have a
relatively short, stiff "mule" saw blade. My have ownership of a
couple of smaller mill stones, or would shape some wedges of local limestone or
sandstone and "bind" it in a home forged metal ring. These first
mill wrights would make
everything come together and work, and be the first to grind enough grain in an
area to satisfy the local needs of 10-100plus entry level pioneer
families.

Millers often became very successful for a
number of reasons. They were some of the first settlers into an area, they
had multiple skills, they often had capital from another milling
operation. Millers were loggers, carpenters, coopers, smiths, masons,
farmers, businessmen all in one package. None of them could be lacking in
drive, goals, ability very long and exist. Their mills were generally the
first "industry" in an area like Fayette, Iowa or Shelbyville,
Missouri, entering with the first farmers. Mills always attracted
supporting craftsman and merchants, and were the roots for small villages to
spring up. The early millers often acquired substantial land as they were
in the area early, bought land cheap, then sold for double or triple within only
years. May have moved on and started the process all over, or often their
offspring had gained milling skills and knowledge by the time they were in their
late teens or early twenties and would push out into newly opened
territory. Small milling stones would be in the 18" range, while the
larger stones would be 4-6 feet across. Stones could be made from granite
boulders, or quarried, but local mid-western limestone would not work well, as
it was soft and ground away. Sandstone was similar. The best mill stones
were one piece stones of good granite. Local stones were used if nothing
else was available. Often large stones were made in pie like segments held
together by a big strap of metal forged by the miller or a blacksmith. A
flour mill was often as good as it mill stones. The legend of the early
millers continued until all the land was gobbled up from the Native Americans,
and the big industrial mills like the ones in the Duluth area took over with the
advent and ability of the railroads during the later quarter of the
1800's.

Early settlers would bring their corn/wheat,
oats, barley, rye, etc. for miles around to these water mills to have their
grist ground. It also has to be remembered that these mills often served two
functions, grinding grist and sawing logs. Most early pioneer mills had
both grist stones and saw blades, and it was just a matter of changing the
gearing to run either. In the early 1850's in Fayette County, Iowa, the
mills of Alexander at Westfield, Marvin at Albany, Earl at Albany would be of
major consequence to the farmers of the area. By the late 1850's through
the 1870's, mills all along the Volga, at the settlements of Westfield, Fayette,
Albany, Lima, Wadena, Volga would take on a similar function of being the center
of local social/business gatherings. Sometimes, they would have to wait
for two or three days for their turn. This necessitated their coming prepared to
spend a night or two at the mill, consequently they would bring along their
camping outfits for the occasion. Going to mill was a great event for the
household. The corn was shelled by hand at home, or wheat/oats thrashed, and
made ready to be ground into meal when their turn came at the mill.
Generally the grain was placed into wooden "flour" barrels and loaded
on an ox cart or later large "farm" wagons drawn by big Morgan or
Belgium draft horses. Skin bags could be used, and later when more cloth
was available, flour bags. Going to the Mill was also an occasion
for a lot of visiting while waiting your turn and visitors were able to get the
latest news and gossip of the community. Many games, wresting, boxing and
shooting matches were engaged in at these times. Only about two trips a year
were made to the mill if you had a very long distance to go. The mill in
the Albany valley was a very favored mill during the 1860''s, and the area of
Albany would have been an area of "rendezvous" for the early farmers.
It also must be remembered that these milling villages were only a few years
old, so everything was freshly built and cleared, or in a very natural
state. These were tough times, hard work times, but also very active,
exciting times for the first "land" owners.

In these days very few people had the money to
pay for the grinding of the meal. The miller received his pay by taking
"toll", a portion of the meal that was ground. This extra meal that
the miller acquired he usually traded it for pelts, beeswax or some other
commodity that was used as a medium of exchange in those pioneer days.

STEAM POWERED MILLS
Soon after the water mills came into use the steam mills were developed. With
the coming of the use of steam for the power to turn the mills it was possible
to construct a mill in practically every town and village in the county. In many
cases the steam engine was used to supplement the water wheels for power when
the water in the streams was low. Eventually, the water mills finally gave way
to the steam mills as they in their turn have been replaced by mills operated by
electric power.

THE WESTFIELD WOOLEN MILL

The big woolen mill in Westfield (Fayette,
Iowa) was located near the north end of the old mill run, which today is
the dry run under the bridge just to the east or town side of Klock's Island
part. It sat on the east side of this dry run 150 or so from the Volga
River, into which the mill run emptied. It probably like other woolen
mills of the ear, 1860-1870's, contained two sets of machinery and processed about 50,000
pounds of wool annually. Thus one has to assume there were a good number
of sheep raised in the Fayette area in the early years. We know most
settlers had to raise at least a limited number of sheep for the spinning of
wool yarn for weaving into clothing if they were to be self-sufficient and
capable of moving into an area and living very long without support from
"back east." And another consideration that must be remembered
concerning life through most of the history of the world, money in any quantity
within the general population is a recent occurrence. Wool clothing had to be
made for survival on the frontier in most cases

The woolen mill in Westfield received wool from neighboring farmers and card
or mechanically brush or pull it into fibers of even quality, and then to shape
the wool into rolls. These were then returned to the farmers to be spun into yarn
and woven into cloth. The cloth was again sent to the mill to be fetted or
fulled and finished, after which it was returned to the owners and made into
family clothing.

Woolen mills the size of the Westfield mill
generally employed 20-40 workers, with 1 of 3 being women. Pay would be
from $10-20 per month by the 1870's. All types of local mills started to
have trouble competing with the big industrial complexes developing around the
cities with rail transportation making it possible to move goods anywhere in
America. The "hay day" of local mill wrights was gone by the
1900's.

The remains of a wooden second generation mill in NE
MO during the 1920's